christie's employs people with experience in correctly valuing antiques and memorabilia. gee, i wonder who i should trust -- the experts, with years of proven experience in the field, or an anonymous coward?
"Of course, what's going on is not understanding, but logic, like you learn in high school"
Now, that's a stand you might take -- although i'd say that a meaningful majority of the people who think about these things for a living disagree. But the 'of course' is completely unwarranted -- this might be the most-discussed philosophical issue of the last 30 years, and it's dismissed here because apparently understanding means 'what humans do when they synthesize information, but not what machines do when they perform a very similar activity'.
like i say, this is nitpicking, maybe. it's a nice article. but i think that it's important, if we're going to make 'of course' statements about the relationship between syntax, semantics, and what understanding is, that we should remain cognizant of the fact that this is a terribly complicated issue without a whole lot of 'of course' about it. that is, i'm not clear on what grounds the author concludes that the semweb is not understanding.
Look, i'm a fan of GTA3, serioiusly, and more than that, i appreciate the object lesson that the game is in the power of a relatively undirected game to be compelling, whatever, games as something other than games bla bla bla
But honestly, doesn't a story like this leave a bad taste in anyone else's mouth? That a big gaming story is the re-release of a two-year old game that's already sold like a buzilliathon copies for the system with the 80 % marketshare?
Shouldn't this article really be entitled, "public continues to enjoy GTA3"? I don't know what the point of this post is -- i guess i just have GTA fatigue. it's this year's Sims fatigue, and it's starting to really wear on me. i'm too old to root for any console, which means i'm too old to care about this, and shouldn't we all be? 'increased poly counts in the model on xbox, ree ree ree!' 'undermining sony's dominance ra ra ra!'
Sorry, i'm in a bad mood today, but 'Game X that you already have to be released at time (now + 18 months) for system G which will by then be 80 % through its projected lifespan' stories are starting to really grate on my ability to sort through gaming news.
for what seems like decades now we've been hearing wild, utopian speculation regarding an endless stream of leg-covering technologies, each hailed as a 'pants-killer'. on seemingly a yearly basis, it seems, sony or microsoft or archer daniels midland trots out some promising technology to replace pants -- some intended to render not just the item but the entire pants PARADIGM obselete forever. but for all this new-fangledness, what's that on your ass, i ask you? huh!?!?
I agree -- the book was great, eps the chapter you mention. Equally great was the way it captured the reactions of the scientists to what they'd built and how it was being used. Feelings were mixed, the fact that their statements re: ethics of use came late in the building process was kind of indicative of the whole Promethean "build now, wonder what it's going to do to us later" way of doing things.
not being luddite or anything, just saying -- and if being worried about nuclear bombs is too luddite, what can i say?
I think that the funniest part of the article was where Blackley, the XBox guy was like, "he's not helping the industry, he's hurting it," i guess because this genius believes, like someone who had heard about darwin but doesn't really get it, that game development is going somewhere in particular -- in this case, the guy clearly assumes that selling games to people who won't buy something without a lot of blood would mean that games have 'made it'.
What a moron. You've got the guy, the only guy who has like ten multi-million sellers under his belt, the guy who brought the console back and brought us Zelda with it, a guy who has been through two video game recessions and helped see to it that they gross more than hollywood, and he's not helping games. Ahem. Pardon me, Seamus, but how are XBox sales?
I appreciate the fact that lots of people think that games are for kiddies, and surely Miyamoto's not doing a lot in the way of evangelizing to those poeple. And I'm glad, because every minute he spends doing that (for what, by the way?) he's not making the next Pikmin or Mario or Zelda.
You offer a much-needed service. As a future enhancement, you might consider simply releasing a list of your clients, so i can avoid attemtpting to view their pages altogether. I'd be more than willing to wwork on things on the server side to redirect free-loading http requests from a popup-blocker to a similar site which does not block access via your service.
Please let me know if you would like to collaborate, I'm offering my services for free, and I'll be sure to forward this same offer to any of your clients I come across, to prevent them from having to handle unneccessary traffic. In fact, it would probably be worthwhile for me to start collecting a list of your clients myself and making them available, along with lists of alternate sites with similar content. Please let me know if you'd like to help, as it should make your job a lot easier. If we can redirect all traffic from your client sites, you shouldn't have to worry much at all about blocking free-loaders. Thanks,
Well, the responses all seem to say the same thing, that this is a tough thing to do because the standard itself would be so up in the air. My initial thought would be to let newspeople set the rules, which is how, say, civil engineers do it, but even that's no good, because i have to imagine that's pretty political.
To your first point, that the problem is self-solving, that among real organizations the editorial has a great deal of power over the publishers, this is true, but i think it only captures half the problem. The issue is not that organizations with good editorial staffs will produce real news, but rather that it will be indistinguishable from papers and shows without good editorial intentions. Two papers, forty percent ads by volume, one written by people with a desire for integrity, one written by people who want to sell ads -- there's no way to tell the difference.
Which leads to your second point, which is purely subjective, i think -- generally, i think that i can tell the difference between real and sponsored news, but i'm just not sure. and i'm not sure that people who are less skeptical, for whatever reason, ever make this distinction. So i think that even though picking out the obvious offenders is simple, it's the less obvious, as well as the people without the time to read this way, who can stand to benefit from this sort of a system.
Now, don't get me wrong -- i completely understand that i've done little to address the question of who actually sets these standards -- but i do believe that they would have some value on the basis of the fact that not everyone watches as closely as i (and obvioiusly you) do.
yeah, boy, this certainly set me straight. attempting to begin a discussion on a comment board. whatever was i thinking, 'perl_god'. oh, nothing pretentious about the nick, btw.
Something I've been kicking around for a while, and I'm neither pro nor against, so I'm wondering if anyone would like to think this through with me, is the idea of strict rules (either from the govt or some trade organization) regarding what can and can't be called 'news'. If i make my orange juice from concentrate, i have to tell people. If i manufacture my sparkling wine in brooklyn, i can't call it champagne. Perhaps there's a public good in someone saying, "it's not news if it's for-profit", or "it's not news if there's any commercials", or something like that.
It doesn't solve the problem, but it does highlight the phenomenon. Anyone?
this is a good point, but it's not really a closed/open or GPL/non-GPL issue -- at the end of the day, this is a management issue, and an ethical issue on the part of the employee. while i understand the problem you describe, it doesn't bring anything new to the table that hasn't been present in the workplace for years -- an accountant fudges numbers, a welder does his less-than-best, a mechanic makes a dumb oversight, or, to include myself, a mathematical modeller makes some assumptions, innocently or not, and fails to inform the client. what you describe has less to do with the GPL in particular than with people's willingness to cut corners and occasional failures in communicating which corners have been cut.
That said, just as there's the ASME for inspecting welds, auditing firms to check work, and other big nerds to help me not screw up, the responsibility for not violating the GPL lies with the employer and the employee. You can call this inconvenient and dangerous, but it's no more so (notably less so) than process and quality control is in other industries, and the GPL is no more evil than any other occupational hazard (inattentiveness, ineptitude, see above).
The difference, if there is one, and this may be why it annoys commercial developers, is that it's a man-made hazard. It's supposed to annoy you, it's supposed to make you wish you could write your software for free, even if you can't. And if it's bothering people to the point that commercial developers are saying 'gee, it's hard for me to develop without using it,' i feel for them, but it also sort of makes me smile -- it speaks to the quality and pervasiveness of what coders who are doing it for nothing are able to get done. It's kind of amazing, but the GPL wouldn't be the problem that you're talking about if the free software that went with it wasn't so good.
"If a software application representing 5000 hours uses GPL code that reflects only 100 hours, is the GPL fair in its argument that the entire product is GPL? "
first of all, if the 100 hours is GPLd, then the GPL isn't 'arguing' anything -- the rest *is* GPLd, according to the GPL. using the verb 'argue' here is like saying that my rental agreement 'puts forth the assertion' that i have to pay my landlord every month. it's not appropriate, because there's nothing to argue, no ambiguity. the GPL is very clear here.
second, if GPL'd software is, as the statement is clearly implying, a negligible part of the final product, what's the big deal with spending the other 100 hours to build that part yourself? no one's making you use that 100 hours worth of software.
and imagine how stupid that argument sounds when phrased this way: "i just built a huge program that only makes use of [some copyrighted product] in passing -- why should i have to conform to that company's contract terms in order to use it?" would anyone argue that degree of use is going to make any difference at all here? and if you don't like corporate-bashing, consider this example -- "sure, i stole $100 from you, but i put it towards this car that cost $5000, so why should I owe you anything at all?"
this is a stupid point. if you don't want to use GPLd code, don't, and if you do, understand the terms.
true, but where the heck are they? where's half-life? where's black and white? where's sim golf? where's the sims? where's ut 2003? where's flightsim and train sim?
you make a good point, but we're 7 months into this thing, and there really are very few pc ports to speak of. if this is genuinely a strength to be exploited to ms's advantage, one is being nice to say that they haven't done a very good job at convincing developers and publishers to get on board.
i think a valid question raised by this failure is whether we need to start talking again about whether there's not a qualitative difference between console games (and gamers) and pc gamers. if so, there's no reason to believe that the supposedly-simple porting of pc games to xbox has very much value at all.
I have a PS2, cause, you know, final fantasy, but when it came time to decide whether to get a box or a cube, i looked things up and down, and the fact of the matter is, i *will* play zelda, and i *will* play mario. Call me a fanboy, or just call me a guy who loves quality games, but the fact is that N's franchises guarantee it a spot at the table. Crappy release schedules and the occasional feeling that nintendo thinks i'm 12 years old aside, there will always be three or four games a year that i absolutely *must* play which are nintendo exclusives.
As for MS, there's halo, and....halo. And since i finished that, it's only good for multiplayer, in which case MS has sold one box to four guys. That's a lousy model.
Add to that the fact that parents know it and love it, and in many households, they're buying the games, and nintendo's not getting forced out by anyone.
"All the network needs to be concerned about is how many TVs were tuned to their channel at a given time. "
This is a very good point -- in fact, a PVR drastically increases the number of shows i might watch (such as those which are on during the day or at 4 am), so from that point of view, they may up the average viewership (or potential viewership) of shows in general.
If MS Server products are indeed the biggest threat to high-priced Unix provider alternatives, boy oh boy, Sun must be shaking in their boots!
You know what would be even worse for guys selling Unix systems would be if there was a completely free, readily available posix-compliant operating system that would run on PC hardware! AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Yeah, but you're being too specific here -- from the customer's viewpoint, words aren't the important thing -- the important thing is a physical object which, to this point, could be a) reliably acquired new, or b) acquired used, sometimes, thoguh generally with a hassle. Who care's what's on the paper? Words, music, porn, it's irrelevant. The important thing is that Amazon has ironed out the inefficiency which made it worthwhile to buy new rather than used.
The inefficiency here has nothing to do with books, and everything to do with convenience. Bookstores -- new AND used -- and authors have been able to attribute part of their customer base to the fact that you only had two choices -- buy new, or sort through the used store and hope you get lucky. This unfortunate state of affairs has been vanquished, and that's too bad for certain people, but bemoaning the erasure of an ineffective distribution model -- one which benefits all readers, btw -- i just don't have much patience for it.
inefficiencies exist. one such inefficiency is related to locating the book that you want, used, at a price you're willing to pay. the new-book market has been determining its pricing and its revenue model on the basis of the fact and magnitude of this inefficiency for, oh, let's call it *EVER*.
amazon is presenting The World with one way to eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) this inefficiency, by removing the fee-for-convience that is built into new books, rendering them no easier to get one's hands on than used books.
is this going to hurt new books' sales? probably. i don't see why it wouldn't. do we, as people who have been pissed at record comapnies for the last five years, have any tolerance left for individuals who choose to whine when their business model is exposed as outmoded by advances in technology? no. because when one's business model is threatened by changes in the environment, one can either try to turn back time, or one can embrace this change, and figure out how to best serve their customers given the new set of conditions. the former approach is pathetic and doomed, the latter, in the end, both more viable and admirable.
whether amazon, on the whole, is good or bad for authors is academic here -- although as someone mentioned above, the general increase in availability for both used *and* new books certainly has me buying more. all we need to keep in mind here is how ridiculous the RIAA looks going to court instead of updating its business model, calling on the public to pity them when a new technology makes it clear that they've been riding on an inefficiency for quite a long time.
ladies and gentlemen of the publishing industry, the ride is over, please exit to your left.
This is moronic. It falls apart as soon as we recognize that 'enjoyment' is not a binary state, on or off, but rather occuring in degrees. The total enjoyment = enjoyment level * duration, and your point only makes sense if the only possible values for 'enjoyment' are 1 and 0, or some constant k and 0 where k is the same for all games. Is a 5000-hour game that you barely enjoy at all honestly better than a 20-hour game that is completely engrossing all the way through?
Hopefully, this was a troll. If not, I presume you believe that the latest harry potter should be judged better than, say, hamlet, for its superior duration?
Yeah, the whiny girlfriend you had to buy gifts for was the best.
I guess that part of the problem with games like the kind you're talking about, which would be cool, is that the modelling it would require to build, say, a fake but believable stock market in your pc, is probably extraordinarily complex. and if you're good at it, you're probably not working for a game company, but for a derivatives firm or something.
The MSNBC article is about crappy games, and how they exist. There are crappy games. There have always been, and there will always be crappy games. Now that you can't develop them without a significant investment and a large team, there are fewer 'Bible Adventures' and 'Wally Bear and the No! Gang's, and no 'Tooth Protectors' at all, but there are crappy games of an entirely different sort.
Anyone who feels that games have gotten 'worse', without qualifying that statement in some way, is full of it, or is simply blocking out the part of their brain which held (or maybe has never heard of) the Wall Street Kid, Amagon, King of Kings, M*A*S*H, Vigiliante 8 parts 2 and 3, Mega Man 4, 5, and 6, Pac Man on the Atari -- the list goes on and on.
No one's saying that Monster Party and Burgertime and Utopia shouldn't get props. But there were over 600 carts released for the NES -- how many of them are you really pining after here?
I'm so sick of this discussion. Have you played Super Mario Brothers lately? It's one of the best platformers ever, no doubt, but it's over in 30 minutes. Games are different now than they were ten or fifteen years ago, and you can dislike what has changed about them, but 'better' or 'worse'? Those are awfully broad brushes. For every Blood Wake, there's a Halo, for every Mortal Kombat Advance, there's an Advance Wars, and for every Mall Tycoon, there's an Unreal Tournament. It's the way of the world. Some things are crap. And this is not a new condition, even in the gaming industry.
Now quit your whining and let me get back to my Sim Golf.
"You'll leech all day, but as soon as somebody wants compensation for what they've done, then they've sold out or some such nonsense. "
This is a strawman. In fact, it is entirely possible to believe that someone is doing the right thing, the sensible thing, the necessary thing by charging for their services, and still not want to pay for it. You clearly don't make room for this possibility -- which, i'm sure, covers a lot of people.
"It's like you don't think people *deserve* to be paid for their work if it's online."
Again, you're beating up on something that doesn't exist -- the idea that my desire not to pay must come from a sense of betrayal, and not from (the much more likely spot) my wallet. Maybe (and this isn't me, necessarily) i love/., but i'm broke. Are my alternatives, under your plan, to either get a second job, or qualify as a whiny, thankless bitch? Where's the none-of-the-above that says 'go to kuro5hin' or something?
You don't know me. You don't know why I may or may not leave. But you're wrong if you think that "it costs X amount and i'm not willing to pay that" isn't a (the?) fundamental driver in decisions like these, and once you accept that it is, accusations like the ones that you throw around have no place in the discussion. sure, people whine! they have a right to! but you characterize non-payers as whiners, when, in fact, the only (potentially) accurate characterization would run the other way, with whiners being non-payers (although i'm certain that the evidence will not bear this out, either).
Slashdot Mirror
sure they are.
god forbid we should trust people who do this -- well -- for a living, when we can trust a guy on slashdot who has an opinion and fingers.
and i'm going out on a limb here
christie's employs people with experience in correctly valuing antiques and memorabilia. gee, i wonder who i should trust -- the experts, with years of proven experience in the field, or an anonymous coward?
yawn.
"Of course, what's going on is not understanding, but logic, like you learn in high school"
Now, that's a stand you might take -- although i'd say that a meaningful majority of the people who think about these things for a living disagree. But the 'of course' is completely unwarranted -- this might be the most-discussed philosophical issue of the last 30 years, and it's dismissed here because apparently understanding means 'what humans do when they synthesize information, but not what machines do when they perform a very similar activity'.
like i say, this is nitpicking, maybe. it's a nice article. but i think that it's important, if we're going to make 'of course' statements about the relationship between syntax, semantics, and what understanding is, that we should remain cognizant of the fact that this is a terribly complicated issue without a whole lot of 'of course' about it. that is, i'm not clear on what grounds the author concludes that the semweb is not understanding.
Look, i'm a fan of GTA3, serioiusly, and more than that, i appreciate the object lesson that the game is in the power of a relatively undirected game to be compelling, whatever, games as something other than games bla bla bla
But honestly, doesn't a story like this leave a bad taste in anyone else's mouth? That a big gaming story is the re-release of a two-year old game that's already sold like a buzilliathon copies for the system with the 80 % marketshare?
Shouldn't this article really be entitled, "public continues to enjoy GTA3"? I don't know what the point of this post is -- i guess i just have GTA fatigue. it's this year's Sims fatigue, and it's starting to really wear on me. i'm too old to root for any console, which means i'm too old to care about this, and shouldn't we all be? 'increased poly counts in the model on xbox, ree ree ree!' 'undermining sony's dominance ra ra ra!'
Sorry, i'm in a bad mood today, but 'Game X that you already have to be released at time (now + 18 months) for system G which will by then be 80 % through its projected lifespan' stories are starting to really grate on my ability to sort through gaming news.
for what seems like decades now we've been hearing wild, utopian speculation regarding an endless stream of leg-covering technologies, each hailed as a 'pants-killer'. on seemingly a yearly basis, it seems, sony or microsoft or archer daniels midland trots out some promising technology to replace pants -- some intended to render not just the item but the entire pants PARADIGM obselete forever. but for all this new-fangledness, what's that on your ass, i ask you? huh!?!?
man, am i hung over.
not being luddite or anything, just saying -- and if being worried about nuclear bombs is too luddite, what can i say?
I think that the funniest part of the article was where Blackley, the XBox guy was like, "he's not helping the industry, he's hurting it," i guess because this genius believes, like someone who had heard about darwin but doesn't really get it, that game development is going somewhere in particular -- in this case, the guy clearly assumes that selling games to people who won't buy something without a lot of blood would mean that games have 'made it'.
What a moron. You've got the guy, the only guy who has like ten multi-million sellers under his belt, the guy who brought the console back and brought us Zelda with it, a guy who has been through two video game recessions and helped see to it that they gross more than hollywood, and he's not helping games. Ahem. Pardon me, Seamus, but how are XBox sales?
I appreciate the fact that lots of people think that games are for kiddies, and surely Miyamoto's not doing a lot in the way of evangelizing to those poeple. And I'm glad, because every minute he spends doing that (for what, by the way?) he's not making the next Pikmin or Mario or Zelda.
Hi,
You offer a much-needed service. As a future enhancement, you might consider simply releasing a list of your clients, so i can avoid attemtpting to view their pages altogether. I'd be more than willing to wwork on things on the server side to redirect free-loading http requests from a popup-blocker to a similar site which does not block access via your service.
Please let me know if you would like to collaborate, I'm offering my services for free, and I'll be sure to forward this same offer to any of your clients I come across, to prevent them from having to handle unneccessary traffic. In fact, it would probably be worthwhile for me to start collecting a list of your clients myself and making them available, along with lists of alternate sites with similar content. Please let me know if you'd like to help, as it should make your job a lot easier. If we can redirect all traffic from your client sites, you shouldn't have to worry much at all about blocking free-loaders. Thanks,
Henry Quinn
Brooklyn NY
Well, the responses all seem to say the same thing, that this is a tough thing to do because the standard itself would be so up in the air. My initial thought would be to let newspeople set the rules, which is how, say, civil engineers do it, but even that's no good, because i have to imagine that's pretty political.
To your first point, that the problem is self-solving, that among real organizations the editorial has a great deal of power over the publishers, this is true, but i think it only captures half the problem. The issue is not that organizations with good editorial staffs will produce real news, but rather that it will be indistinguishable from papers and shows without good editorial intentions. Two papers, forty percent ads by volume, one written by people with a desire for integrity, one written by people who want to sell ads -- there's no way to tell the difference.
Which leads to your second point, which is purely subjective, i think -- generally, i think that i can tell the difference between real and sponsored news, but i'm just not sure. and i'm not sure that people who are less skeptical, for whatever reason, ever make this distinction. So i think that even though picking out the obvious offenders is simple, it's the less obvious, as well as the people without the time to read this way, who can stand to benefit from this sort of a system.
Now, don't get me wrong -- i completely understand that i've done little to address the question of who actually sets these standards -- but i do believe that they would have some value on the basis of the fact that not everyone watches as closely as i (and obvioiusly you) do.
yeah, boy, this certainly set me straight. attempting to begin a discussion on a comment board. whatever was i thinking, 'perl_god'. oh, nothing pretentious about the nick, btw.
Another winner is How to watch tv news by neil postman.
Something I've been kicking around for a while, and I'm neither pro nor against, so I'm wondering if anyone would like to think this through with me, is the idea of strict rules (either from the govt or some trade organization) regarding what can and can't be called 'news'. If i make my orange juice from concentrate, i have to tell people. If i manufacture my sparkling wine in brooklyn, i can't call it champagne. Perhaps there's a public good in someone saying, "it's not news if it's for-profit", or "it's not news if there's any commercials", or something like that.
It doesn't solve the problem, but it does highlight the phenomenon. Anyone?
this is a good point, but it's not really a closed/open or GPL/non-GPL issue -- at the end of the day, this is a management issue, and an ethical issue on the part of the employee. while i understand the problem you describe, it doesn't bring anything new to the table that hasn't been present in the workplace for years -- an accountant fudges numbers, a welder does his less-than-best, a mechanic makes a dumb oversight, or, to include myself, a mathematical modeller makes some assumptions, innocently or not, and fails to inform the client. what you describe has less to do with the GPL in particular than with people's willingness to cut corners and occasional failures in communicating which corners have been cut.
That said, just as there's the ASME for inspecting welds, auditing firms to check work, and other big nerds to help me not screw up, the responsibility for not violating the GPL lies with the employer and the employee. You can call this inconvenient and dangerous, but it's no more so (notably less so) than process and quality control is in other industries, and the GPL is no more evil than any other occupational hazard (inattentiveness, ineptitude, see above).
The difference, if there is one, and this may be why it annoys commercial developers, is that it's a man-made hazard. It's supposed to annoy you, it's supposed to make you wish you could write your software for free, even if you can't. And if it's bothering people to the point that commercial developers are saying 'gee, it's hard for me to develop without using it,' i feel for them, but it also sort of makes me smile -- it speaks to the quality and pervasiveness of what coders who are doing it for nothing are able to get done. It's kind of amazing, but the GPL wouldn't be the problem that you're talking about if the free software that went with it wasn't so good.
"If a software application representing 5000 hours uses GPL code that reflects only 100 hours, is the GPL fair in its argument that the entire product is GPL? "
first of all, if the 100 hours is GPLd, then the GPL isn't 'arguing' anything -- the rest *is* GPLd, according to the GPL. using the verb 'argue' here is like saying that my rental agreement 'puts forth the assertion' that i have to pay my landlord every month. it's not appropriate, because there's nothing to argue, no ambiguity. the GPL is very clear here.
second, if GPL'd software is, as the statement is clearly implying, a negligible part of the final product, what's the big deal with spending the other 100 hours to build that part yourself? no one's making you use that 100 hours worth of software.
and imagine how stupid that argument sounds when phrased this way: "i just built a huge program that only makes use of [some copyrighted product] in passing -- why should i have to conform to that company's contract terms in order to use it?" would anyone argue that degree of use is going to make any difference at all here? and if you don't like corporate-bashing, consider this example -- "sure, i stole $100 from you, but i put it towards this car that cost $5000, so why should I owe you anything at all?"
this is a stupid point. if you don't want to use GPLd code, don't, and if you do, understand the terms.
true, but where the heck are they? where's half-life? where's black and white? where's sim golf? where's the sims? where's ut 2003? where's flightsim and train sim?
you make a good point, but we're 7 months into this thing, and there really are very few pc ports to speak of. if this is genuinely a strength to be exploited to ms's advantage, one is being nice to say that they haven't done a very good job at convincing developers and publishers to get on board.
i think a valid question raised by this failure is whether we need to start talking again about whether there's not a qualitative difference between console games (and gamers) and pc gamers. if so, there's no reason to believe that the supposedly-simple porting of pc games to xbox has very much value at all.
Right on --
I have a PS2, cause, you know, final fantasy, but when it came time to decide whether to get a box or a cube, i looked things up and down, and the fact of the matter is, i *will* play zelda, and i *will* play mario. Call me a fanboy, or just call me a guy who loves quality games, but the fact is that N's franchises guarantee it a spot at the table. Crappy release schedules and the occasional feeling that nintendo thinks i'm 12 years old aside, there will always be three or four games a year that i absolutely *must* play which are nintendo exclusives.
As for MS, there's halo, and....halo. And since i finished that, it's only good for multiplayer, in which case MS has sold one box to four guys. That's a lousy model.
Add to that the fact that parents know it and love it, and in many households, they're buying the games, and nintendo's not getting forced out by anyone.
"All the network needs to be concerned about is how many TVs were tuned to their channel at a given time. "
This is a very good point -- in fact, a PVR drastically increases the number of shows i might watch (such as those which are on during the day or at 4 am), so from that point of view, they may up the average viewership (or potential viewership) of shows in general.
If MS Server products are indeed the biggest threat to high-priced Unix provider alternatives, boy oh boy, Sun must be shaking in their boots!
You know what would be even worse for guys selling Unix systems would be if there was a completely free, readily available posix-compliant operating system that would run on PC hardware! AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Yeah, but you're being too specific here -- from the customer's viewpoint, words aren't the important thing -- the important thing is a physical object which, to this point, could be a) reliably acquired new, or b) acquired used, sometimes, thoguh generally with a hassle. Who care's what's on the paper? Words, music, porn, it's irrelevant. The important thing is that Amazon has ironed out the inefficiency which made it worthwhile to buy new rather than used.
The inefficiency here has nothing to do with books, and everything to do with convenience. Bookstores -- new AND used -- and authors have been able to attribute part of their customer base to the fact that you only had two choices -- buy new, or sort through the used store and hope you get lucky. This unfortunate state of affairs has been vanquished, and that's too bad for certain people, but bemoaning the erasure of an ineffective distribution model -- one which benefits all readers, btw -- i just don't have much patience for it.
inefficiencies exist. one such inefficiency is related to locating the book that you want, used, at a price you're willing to pay. the new-book market has been determining its pricing and its revenue model on the basis of the fact and magnitude of this inefficiency for, oh, let's call it *EVER*.
amazon is presenting The World with one way to eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) this inefficiency, by removing the fee-for-convience that is built into new books, rendering them no easier to get one's hands on than used books.
is this going to hurt new books' sales? probably. i don't see why it wouldn't. do we, as people who have been pissed at record comapnies for the last five years, have any tolerance left for individuals who choose to whine when their business model is exposed as outmoded by advances in technology? no. because when one's business model is threatened by changes in the environment, one can either try to turn back time, or one can embrace this change, and figure out how to best serve their customers given the new set of conditions. the former approach is pathetic and doomed, the latter, in the end, both more viable and admirable.
whether amazon, on the whole, is good or bad for authors is academic here -- although as someone mentioned above, the general increase in availability for both used *and* new books certainly has me buying more. all we need to keep in mind here is how ridiculous the RIAA looks going to court instead of updating its business model, calling on the public to pity them when a new technology makes it clear that they've been riding on an inefficiency for quite a long time.
ladies and gentlemen of the publishing industry, the ride is over, please exit to your left.
This is moronic. It falls apart as soon as we recognize that 'enjoyment' is not a binary state, on or off, but rather occuring in degrees. The total enjoyment = enjoyment level * duration, and your point only makes sense if the only possible values for 'enjoyment' are 1 and 0, or some constant k and 0 where k is the same for all games. Is a 5000-hour game that you barely enjoy at all honestly better than a 20-hour game that is completely engrossing all the way through?
Hopefully, this was a troll. If not, I presume you believe that the latest harry potter should be judged better than, say, hamlet, for its superior duration?
Yeah, the whiny girlfriend you had to buy gifts for was the best.
I guess that part of the problem with games like the kind you're talking about, which would be cool, is that the modelling it would require to build, say, a fake but believable stock market in your pc, is probably extraordinarily complex. and if you're good at it, you're probably not working for a game company, but for a derivatives firm or something.
The MSNBC article is about crappy games, and how they exist. There are crappy games. There have always been, and there will always be crappy games. Now that you can't develop them without a significant investment and a large team, there are fewer 'Bible Adventures' and 'Wally Bear and the No! Gang's, and no 'Tooth Protectors' at all, but there are crappy games of an entirely different sort.
Anyone who feels that games have gotten 'worse', without qualifying that statement in some way, is full of it, or is simply blocking out the part of their brain which held (or maybe has never heard of) the Wall Street Kid, Amagon, King of Kings, M*A*S*H, Vigiliante 8 parts 2 and 3, Mega Man 4, 5, and 6, Pac Man on the Atari -- the list goes on and on.
No one's saying that Monster Party and Burgertime and Utopia shouldn't get props. But there were over 600 carts released for the NES -- how many of them are you really pining after here?
I'm so sick of this discussion. Have you played Super Mario Brothers lately? It's one of the best platformers ever, no doubt, but it's over in 30 minutes. Games are different now than they were ten or fifteen years ago, and you can dislike what has changed about them, but 'better' or 'worse'? Those are awfully broad brushes. For every Blood Wake, there's a Halo, for every Mortal Kombat Advance, there's an Advance Wars, and for every Mall Tycoon, there's an Unreal Tournament. It's the way of the world. Some things are crap. And this is not a new condition, even in the gaming industry.
Now quit your whining and let me get back to my Sim Golf.
In my early-morning haze, that's how this headline reached my cortex. You can imagine how disappointed I am right now.
"You'll leech all day, but as soon as somebody wants compensation for what they've done, then they've sold out or some such nonsense. "
/., but i'm broke. Are my alternatives, under your plan, to either get a second job, or qualify as a whiny, thankless bitch? Where's the none-of-the-above that says 'go to kuro5hin' or something?
This is a strawman. In fact, it is entirely possible to believe that someone is doing the right thing, the sensible thing, the necessary thing by charging for their services, and still not want to pay for it. You clearly don't make room for this possibility -- which, i'm sure, covers a lot of people.
"It's like you don't think people *deserve* to be paid for their work if it's online."
Again, you're beating up on something that doesn't exist -- the idea that my desire not to pay must come from a sense of betrayal, and not from (the much more likely spot) my wallet. Maybe (and this isn't me, necessarily) i love
You don't know me. You don't know why I may or may not leave. But you're wrong if you think that "it costs X amount and i'm not willing to pay that" isn't a (the?) fundamental driver in decisions like these, and once you accept that it is, accusations like the ones that you throw around have no place in the discussion. sure, people whine! they have a right to! but you characterize non-payers as whiners, when, in fact, the only (potentially) accurate characterization would run the other way, with whiners being non-payers (although i'm certain that the evidence will not bear this out, either).